Sunday Times Literary Awards shortlist: Q&A with Khumisho Moguerane on ‘Morafe: Person, Family and Nation in Colonial Bechuanaland, 1880s and 1950s’

Non-fiction Award

Criteria: The winner should demonstrate the illumination of truthfulness, especially those forms of it that are new, delicate, unfashionable and fly in the face of power; compassion; elegance of writing; and intellectual and moral integrity.

We asked Khumisho Moguerane, author of Morafe: Person, Family and Nation in Colonial Bechuanaland, 1880s and 1950s (Jacana Media) some questions about her book, which is shortlisted for the non-fiction award:

Who was the Molema family and why did you decide to write about them?

In many ways, the Molemas are an ordinary family. They are like all of us — parents and children, spouses and siblings — who daily aspire towards occupying more securely that familiar place we call “home.” The Molemas left an extraordinary record of their everyday lives from the 1880s to the 1950s, which reveals the mundane and intimate details of their family lives in present-day Mahikeng, in today’s North West. They were educated, pious and landowning. We see in their records the dilemmas that make family dramas such a compelling genre for many writers. Every generation confronts the question of how, and under which circumstances, we can pull away from duty and pursue our own personal desires. The Molemas’ records offer seven decades of how one family grappled with this universal dilemma, especially fathers and sons. The Molemas’ record gave me an opportunity to foreground the everyday negotiations of “connectedness” between intimates, especially between fathers and sons, as the moral dilemma at the heart of our political history.

Morafe (pronounced morahe) is a Tswana word that you write that is difficult to translate into English. Instead of “tribe” or “nation” (as some would ascribe to it), you clearly express that a more accurate definition would be “a community of persons”. Can you elaborate on this?

The word morafe appears mostly in private conversations between family members, but these were not families merely in the biological sense of the word. These conversations convey an understanding that biology simply makes each of us a physical entity, no different from an animal, a stone or a piece of grass. What makes us human beings, the Molemas and others argued, is “personhood”, or botho, but of course there is no laboratory that defines and measures whether any species embodies this quality. However, only human beings have the cognitive, linguistic and cultural capacity to debate what practices make us uniquely human. Only we, human beings, set moral terms on our “connectedness.” The morafe is how we exist in the world as uniquely human, that is with esteem, with the confirmation from others that we are more than mere “things.” The same word is what members of the radical African National Congress from 1949, not least Modiri Molema translated as “nationhood”. However, before it animated his political discourse, the word mediated a heated exchange with his father, Silas Molema. Was it personhood for him, a son to choose his own bride, or was it a shameful animal instinct? A key theme in the book is whether nationalism is also a way of resolving deeply personal disagreements about the moral practices of personhood.

The Molema kin were called “border people” because they straddled what would become present-day South Africa and Botswana. Their lives are especially important to understanding the changing dynamics both geographically and politically from the 1880s to 1950s, but you write that the other important factors to take into account is how it changed the people socially and morally in their everyday lives. Can you explain why?

In the early 1900s, Silas Molema was a member of an educated, ambitious and landowning ruling class along the border of present-day Botswana and South Africa. From 1910, the governments of the colonies south of the Molopo River formed a Union of South Africa, in which there was no place for black property ownership or aspiration. The infamous Natives Land Act of 1913 reveals the colonial government’s intention to crush families like the Molemas and to bring their lands under its control. It aimed to make “South Africa” a white man’s country. It is easy to imagine that the brute force of the colonial state, including the Land Act, is what achieved this, but the Molemas’ story reveals just how fragile the colonial project often was in these parts and how ineffective even legislation like the Land Act could be at achieving the government’s aims. The greatest stumbling block to these official, segregationist plans was people’s moral quest to be, and remain, within the moral universe of personhood. The everyday moral basis of “connectedness”, especially on the land, set the limits on what the colonial enterprise could achieve because no colonial authority can rely on force alone. People’s moral lives shaped the possibilities of their colonial experience. Colonialism only succeeded smoothly where segregation also supported ordinary people’s everyday practices of personhood.

So much detail has gone into your book. How did you research it? And how do you prevent the research from overwhelming the narrative?

As a reader, my first love has always been literature. Both history and literature offer an exploration of the human experience; only as historians do we hold ourselves accountable to an interpretation of an archive, in other words, “real” lives. I approached the sources as a record of relationships in various states of brokenness and repair, revealing the experiences we all share, of shame and loss, or of desire and happiness, and so on. It is literature’s subject matter. I also allowed myself freedom to use sources that may have very little historiographical bearing, but bring mood and colour to the narrative. I dwelt extensively on strategies to develop the characters through the dilemmas and turmoil of their lives. I told their stories as people first and foremost, not as tools to make a historiographical point. It mattered that Sebopioa Molema’s once had pyjamas made that were too tight, and that Harriet Molema loved a man with a mental illness.

What impression do you want readers to take away with them after reading the book?

I hope that we can reflect on the Molemas’ conviction that conversation is the only way to live with hope, not because we always agree, but because dialogue belongs to the set of moral practices that make us human beings. We should not give up on reaching across the divide just because the bargaining field is not yet equal, or that the more powerful players have already embarked on a project of violence. We decide for ourselves on the moral terms that make us human. I would like readers to consider these perspectives as pertinent to our times.

In what way do you think the book “illuminates truthfulness”?

The very concept of “morafe” suggests that there is no singular “truth” that can anchor us to be at “home” in the world. We come to a consensus of what we require from one another to belong in a marriage, a family, a school, a country, through negotiation. It is an alarming situation because we are not always heard when we speak, and yet, how we experience our existence in the world depends on our “connectedness” to others. As the popular saying goes, motho ke motho ka batho, “a person is a person through other persons,” but our dependence on one another for the confirmation of our humanity makes a quintessentially human existence contingent and fragile. This is what makes struggles for personhood politically explosive.